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With the prevalence of hustle culture, it can
become difficult to find time to unwind and
de-stress. So, the Alberta Black Therapist Network
(ABTN) partnered with Sangea Academy to
organize the Getting to Abundance program, a
series of dance classes intended to help promote
wellness for African Caribbean women in
leadership positions.
The program’s development and operation
was supported by Edmonton Community
Foundation, which provided a $5,900 BIPOC
grant. The program started last September and
concluded in November.
Bunkola Ojelade, an ABTN therapist
who leads the somatic movements section
of the session, believes that the program is a
vital necessity because of the busy lives that
many attendees lead. “Many of these women
are mothers. Many of these women are
students. Many of these women carry a lot of
responsibilities,” she says.
The two-hour sessions typically began with
Ojelade leading attendees through somatic
movements, exercises that help connect the
physical body and the mind. “When you think
[about] what your emotions are, and how that
affects this turbulence in the body,” says Ojelade.
“We experience sensations that are pleasant or
unpleasant, depending on how we interpret it.”
After Ojelade led attendees through somatic
movements, they did a dance routine led by
Reckie Lloyd, the dance instructor and co-founder
of Sangea Academy.
“I have to teach the dance movements step-
by-step,” says Lloyd, “breaking it down, and
The remaining 30 minutes allowed attendees to
connect and network. While the attendees came from
different professional fields and sectors, they found
commonality and connection in the sessions. For some
women, these sessions became a comfortable and safe
space away from the hecticness of daily life.
“Because I saw, for many other women, that made
such a difference in how they respond to stress and
how they respond to the task in their day-to-day,
right?” says Ojelade. “[And] having a place, a space to
talk about it, and to put it in dance, put it in you know,
in centring themselves. So, it kind of helped to ground
many of the women, including myself.”
Although Edmonton Community Foundation
provided the funding for the 10-week operation period,
both Lloyd and Ojelade look forward to potentially
running sessions in the future. Lloyd believes that the
program could benefit Edmontonians by bringing
them together and encouraging them to share their
experiences and culture with one another.
Lloyd says, “This is not just a cultural program, but
a human experience where everybody has a space to
explore, to learn, to better themselves, to know another
person and to release some tension.”
“It will make our city a lot better,” he says. “A lot
more people will get to know one another.”
then speeding it up as we go and then using those
movements as our cardio, so we’ll run it a few times
over and over and over.”
Lloyd, a former track-and-field athlete,
incorporated training drills and body weight training
into African dance. The dancing was accompanied
by the African drum, an instrument that, in some
cultures, has “healing powers in the rhythms because
of their vibration,” says Lloyd.
“This is not just a cultural
program, but a human
experience where everybody
has a space to explore, to
learn, to better themselves,
to know another person and
to release some tension.”
— Reckie Lloyd, dance instructor
and co-founder of Sangea Academy